We need people to select an index and
care for it. Only those indexes listed in bold font in the Central
Catalogue - you may switch back to it if you wish -
currently have their own maintainers. You'll find that most of the
indexes, particularly those under "United States" lack maintainers.

Qualifications

The basic qualification is a willingness to devote an hour or two each
week or so to make an index an effective tool for students and
researchers. Beyond that, one should have an interest in and knowledge of
the subject one is indexing, although maintaining an index in itself soon
makes one something of an expert in the field. A basic knowledge of HTML
would help, but we have templates for entries and so little technical
knowledge of formatting is needed.

What the Job Entails

The Web is always in flux; sites disappear or change their locations
without warning, and an index in which many of the pointers do not work is
not much good to anyone. For this reason, a maintainer should check his
connections every couple of weeks, deleting those pointing to sites that
no longer exist and changing the addresses for those which have been
moved. This could be a tedious job, but there is a link-checker available
for free downloading that does much of the work of finding those pointers
that need to be checked.

Every Index should point to as many of the best resources available, and
new sites are appearing all of the time. This means that the maintainer
should scout the web every now and then - Google and Yahoo! are helpful in
such searches, and we also have lists of excellent indexes other than our
own. The index must be updated with these new sites, but that is a rather
simple matter and can be done in your own machine. An effective FTP
program for downloading copies of the existing index and uploading the
updated index can be downloaded free of charge.

Additionally, there are some tricks of trade that can make the work rather
simple and virtually error-free.

Membership Status

WWW-VL History is part of the World-Wide Web Virtual Library set up by Tim
Berners-Lee, the developer of the Web in 1993 - as a matter of fact, it was the
first index in WWW-VL. WWW-VL numbers over two hundred sites, each with its
maintainer. Since the very beginning, each maintainer has been considered the
owner of his or her index and is an equal member of the WWW-VL organization. The
members of WWW-VL History have developed certain general and common rules, which
you may view
by clicking here.
and agreed to abide by them in order to create a network of indexes each
organized much like the others so that the user is not confronted with an
entirely new situation each time he or she changes from one index to another.
Nevertheless, we are colleagues and not bosses and workers.

We have a discussion list closed to all but fellow maintainers, and we share
information, and a bit of fellowship, through this means.

Rewards

There are no tangible rewards for this sort of work, but the knowledge that you
are performing a service for hundreds of thousands of people can be both
satisfying and fulfilling. The main catalog of WWW-VL History receives over
300,000 visitors annually, which is not all that many until one considers that
people use the main catalog to find the indexes they want to use, bookmark them
and perhaps never visit the Central Catalog again.

Then, too, there are advantages to working with and getting to know an
international group of like-minded people. Scholars who use the web for research
are full of praise for WWW-VL History and are very likely to know who provides
them with the tools they use. For this reason, maintaining a WWW-VL index can
provide one with an important line in one's resume.

What Next

Please read over the materials in the section
describing our project and listing the present members. If you would like to
participate, you should decide upon the index that you would like to maintain and
whether you have a site in which to place your index or whether we should try to
provide one for you. Then send me a note at
lhnelson@ku.edu asking whatever questions have occurred to you, telling me what
you would like to do and providing some information about yourself so that I can
introduce you to the other members.